Dr. Scott Magness

Associate Professor - UNC/NCSU Joint Departments of Biomedical Engineering

Dr. Magness is an Associate Professor in the UNC/NCSU joint Departments of Biomedical Engineering. His research is focused on investigating the genetic mechanisms that control the behavior of intestinal and colonic stem cells in health, injury and disease states including inflammatory bowel disease and cancer. Dr. Magness’ group pioneered new intestinal “organoid" technologies in the USA, and has developed a number of platforms that utilize stem cells derived from organ transplant donors or patient biopsies for basic/translational science and commercial applications. For this work Dr. Magness was given a Transformative Research Award from the National Institutes of Health to develop a human intestinal simulacrum (or mimic) with UNC collaborators. The technology derived from this research was spun-out into Altis Biosystems Inc., which is a hybrid biological tools/CRO focused on providing the pharmaceutical industry with better preclinical cell culture models of the human gut to test drug absorption, secretion, and toxicology.

Cloning in the Third Dimension: Breakthroughs in 3D Biology

Traditional organoid culture can present challenges for the downstream analysis of single organoids. In this webinar, Dr. Allysa Stern will discuss a unique workflow that enables clonal organoid development, monitoring of iPSC differentiation over time and automated isolation of single organoids.

Dr. Scott Magness will then present a case related to his group’s work investigating tumor cell heterogeneity through clonal organoid morphology and transcriptomics. He will discuss new approaches using single organoid transcriptomics to evaluate organoids derived from single cells from gastric dysplastic tissues and how this approach might reveal new ways to investigate tumor cell heterogeneity and evasion of some cells from cancer treatments.